I recently completed a continuing education course on story-telling, which made me reflect on my love of reading and telling stories with my parents and siblings while growing up.\u00a0 The course discussed many different aspects of story-telling, from assessing a child\u2019s ability to tell a story, the importance of story-telling, and ways to promote the ability to tell a story.\u00a0 For instance, stories play a role in understanding a person\u2019s way of thinking and building a community. We use stories in every part of our life, whether it is describing our day, something funny that happened at school, or using our imagination to describe our hopes.\u00a0 For children, stories provide a bridge between literacy and oral language skills.<\/p>\n
Based on this recent course, one important thing to look at a child\u2019s story telling ability is their ability to use episodes in their story.\u00a0 An episode is simply a problem, a complication, and a solution.\u00a0 It can be as simple as \u201cI woke up and I wanted to get dressed.\u00a0 But I couldn\u2019t find my shoes.\u00a0 Luckily, Mom found them under the table\u201d.\u00a0 This has our problem (e.g., wanting to get dressed), a complication (e.g., can\u2019t find shoes) and a solution (e.g., Mom found them).<\/p>\n
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For younger children in preschool, they often have a pre-episodic structure, meaning they tell stories that are more like descriptions or actions.\u00a0 For instance, a young child may try to tell a story by saying \u201cThe boy has a frog.\u00a0 The frog is green.\u00a0 The frog jumps.\u201d\u00a0 The child is simply describing a picture, but we are missing those key problem\/complication\/solution parts that make stories interesting.\u00a0 Action sequences are a little more advanced, such as \u201cThe frog jumped.\u00a0 Then he went in the water.\u00a0 Then he ate some bugs.\u00a0 Then he went to sleep.\u201d)\u00a0 This is a great sequence of events but is still missing those key elements.\u00a0 As a parent, you can help start adding to your child\u2019s story-telling by helping them identify some feelings and add them to the story.\u00a0 For instance, going to our frog example, you could ask your child how the frog felt when he ate some bugs.\u00a0 Then your child could add \u201cHe was happy eating the bugs.\u201d\u00a0 Then talk about why things are happening, or the motivation of the character. Maybe the frog was eating because he was hungry or he went swimming because he was hot.<\/p>\n
The course also discussed ways to help older children (about age 8 or older) create stories.\u00a0 Once your child has the basic episode structure of a story, we can begin to add more pieces and descriptions to make it more interesting.\u00a0 One way to do this is by repeating words for emphasis.\u00a0 Think of the difference in meaning for \u201cHe was tired\u201d compared to \u201cHe was very, very, very tired.\u201d\u00a0 You can also have your child tell you more about the setting of the story, such as \u201cOnce upon a time, in the dark forest, a boy walked on a rocky path\u201d\u00a0 or by giving the character\u2019s names and descriptions.\u00a0 One fun way to connect the whole family is by telling \u201cBeep\u201d stories.\u00a0 Have one person start the story and tell one sentence.\u00a0 The person then says \u201cBeep\u201d and it passes to the next family member.\u00a0 It\u2019s a great way include family members of all ages and will create a hilarious story, as each person changes the story.<\/p>\n
Have lots of fun!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I recently completed a continuing education course on story-telling, which made me reflect on my love of reading and telling stories with my parents and siblings while growing up.\u00a0 The course discussed many different aspects of story-telling, from assessing a child\u2019s ability to tell a story, the importance of story-telling, and ways to promote the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","schema":"","fname":"","lname":"","position":"","credentials":"","placeID":"","no_match":false,"name":"","company":"","review":"","address":"","city":"","state":"","zip":"","lat":"","lng":"","phone1":"","phone2":"","fax":"","mon1":"","mon2":"","tue1":"","tue2":"","wed1":"","wed2":"","thu1":"","thu2":"","fri1":"","fri2":"","sat1":"","sat2":"","sun1":"","sun2":"","hours-note":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[243,916],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3602"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3602"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12387,"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3602\/revisions\/12387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}